Category: w.b. yeats

Yeats is, as the back of this particular edition of his best works says, probably “the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.” Of course, the attentive reader will note the careful wording here that separates Yeats as much as possible from that word “English,” as, although he wrote in English, he is a definitively Irish poet. His poetry, soaked with references to the history, mythology, and landscape of Ireland and exhibiting an uniquely Irish character, is an embodiment of Irishness, if such a thing exists. In particular, it embodies the tenuous state of Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century, a nation both young and old simultaneously, worn out and vigorous at once.

In addition to embodying the Irish national character, however, Yeats is also a poet for all modern people. His obsessive fear of age and death, a theme that runs throughout the poems here, is very much a modern ailment. So, too, is the desire for meaning and mysticism even in a world grown decidedly meaningless and flat. In all of this and more, Yeats is the poet of modernity.

This particular edition is a nearly perfect collection of the very best of Yeats. Rosenthal’s introduction and notes are not overwhelming, as scholarly editions and collected works so often are. Instead, the editor provides just the right amount of commentary to allow the reader who is new to the work of Yeats to approach with understanding. I recommend this edition to anyone who wants an excellent introduction to the works of the great poet of the twentieth-century.

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

We have cried in our despair
That men desert,
For some trivial affair
Or noisy, insolent sport,
Beauty that we have won
From bitterest hours;
Yet we, had we walked within
Those topless towers
Where Helen walked with her boy,
Had given but as the rest
Of the men and women of Troy,
A word and a jest.

Among the thing that dramatic action must burn up are the author’s opinions; while he is writing he has no business to know anything that is not a portion of that action. Do you suppose for one moment that Shakespeare educated Hamlet and King Lear by telling them what he thought and believed? As I see it, Hamlet and Lear educated Shakespeare, and I have no doubt that in the process of that education he found out that he was an altogether different man to what he thought himself, and had altogether different beliefs. A dramatist can help his characters to educate him by thinking and studying everything that gives them the language they are groping for through his hands and eyes, but the control must be theirs, and that is why the ancient philosophers thought a poet or dramatist Daimon-possessed.